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Citrix XenServer CTO, Simon Crosby, interviewed

The Syscon guys RSS me all the time so we will linkback to the guys with this post ;-)

Virtualization Journal: Starting at 35,000 ft…where does the Xen hypervisor fit in the virtualization universe?
Simon Crosby: The Xen hypervisor is the industry’s most strategic code base for virtualization. Why? First, it is a tiny, optimized, open source reference standard hypervisor for a wide range of CPU architectures, with extensive support for high performance virtualization-enhanced CPUs and I/O subsystems. Because it has multiple routes to market in any given year, the hardware manufacturers ensure that Xen has “first and best” support for the latest hardware, ensuring that it always leads the industry in scalability and performance. In addition:
  • It is collaboratively built by the industry’s leading IT vendors, led by Citrix and including Intel, AMD, IBM, HP, Novell, Red Hat, Sun, VA Linux and many others.
  • The Xen security architecture is contributed by the security community, including researchers, IBM’s secure hypervisor project, the NSA and DoD.
  • Xen is used in the world’s largest virtualization deployments, for example by Amazon, with a deployment of thousands of servers virtualized using Xen.
  • The Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor is in fact an implementation of the Xen reference architecture, built by Microsoft, and compatible with Citrix XenServer.
Virtualization Journal: The first public release of Xen was made available in 2003, how long did it take for you and your Cambridge collaborators to get it to that stage?
Crosby: The Xen code base has been in development now for seven years. When we started XenSource, we had released Xen 2.5, and were working on Xen 3.0.


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